There's crimes against persons, and crimes against property.

Different demographics and conditions.

What would be interesting would be to look not just at gun laws but also at sentencing patterns and early releases and plea bargains.

Laws on the books are worthless if convicts get early releases for gun crimes (while pot growers and 3x bike thieves get life).

Good question.

Louisiana and Vermont both have very loose gun regulations. Louisiana has the highest murder rate, Vermont one of the lowest.

My home state of California has some of the tightest gun laws in the nation, yet our murder rate is nothing to be proud of.

The District of Columbia has a higher murder rate than any state.

Here's a map of homicide rates by state. IMO it doesn't really show any kind of correlation between gun laws and murders.

On the other hand, DC had a pretty much absolute handgun ban for 30 years.

Meanwhile, violent crimes have dropped steadily over 20 years nationwide, while gun control legislation has been all over the map federally and in the states.

Crime is a complex thing.

Massachusetts has the strictest of gun laws and had 1.53 per 100,000 in 2004

Vermont has pretty much no gun laws and had .48 per 100,000 in 2004

Both are VERY blue states

One is sparsely populated, one is densely populated.

One may have more hunter types and for protection of home and pets from wild animals then the other.

I think it's a complicated issue.

Conn. it seems does have some of the more stricter gun laws in the country. So you decide.

The Harvard School of Public Health has some info about this.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

Of course, there are other factors as well, for example, there is more crime in cities than in rural areas, and also cities tend to have tighter gun laws.

You'd need to find out where the guns came from that were used in crimes.

I'm sure you have heard it both ways because one side is trying to obscure the facts.

Consider knives. One study did. US and Canadian knife regs are the same for the purposes of this study.

The study looked at violent crime involving knives in a city in British Columbia and in Washington state. The communities weren't even 100 miles apart. The study controlled for income and unemployment, and compared both within and across ethnicities. The researchers controlled--I don't remember how--for the rate of knife ownership by looking not at things like switchblades but kitchen knives. It was a decent bit of research.

The researchers found that the US communities had a much higher rate of knife attacks--more people assaulted, more people murdered. The results were statistically robust.

Canadian gun laws are tighter than American gun laws. Does that lead to less violence with knives? Or does a different value placed on the option of personal violence lead to more restrictive gun laws, or at least their tolerance? Or perhaps history and the basis of the "social contract" are really important?

Perhaps gun control leads to less gun use, as claimed.

Perhaps less gun use leads to greater acceptance of increased gun regulation.

Perhaps an attitude that doesn't value the option of violence or gun use leads to less violence and an acceptance of greater gun regulation.

If a state had plenty of violent crime, they may have instituted gun laws in response.